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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Agamemnon, by Aeschylus
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Title: Agamemnon
Author: Aeschylus
Release Date: December 22, 2004 [EBook #14417]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
- START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AGAMEMNON ***
Produced by Paul Murray, Charles Bidwell and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE
AGAMEMNON
OF
AESCHYLUS
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE
WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY
GILBERT MURRAY
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
TENTH THOUSAND
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.
PREFACE
The sense of difficulty, and indeed of awe, with which a scholar approaches the task of translating the _Agamemnon_ depends directly on its greatness as poetry. It is in part a matter of diction. The language of Aeschylus is an extraordinary thing, the syntax stiff and simple, the vocabulary obscure, unexpected, and steeped in splendour. Its peculiarities cannot be disregarded, or the translation will be false in character. Yet not Milton himself could produce in English the same great music, and a translator who should strive ambitiously to represent the comple